This question is kind of tricky to title. What I need to know is wether or not it's possible to use some program on Windows that could play flash videos from websites.

I'll explain why. I have a second computer which is very slow (Intel Centrino) running on Windows XP. If I try to watch online videos (i.e. YouTube) on fullscreen, it EATS the CPU, plays extremely slow and eventually even heats up the computer making it shutdown.

I've known of some cellphones (particularly, Motorola ex118) that can play YouTube videos with their own player so it could be possible. Right?

4 Answers
4

You've said it perfectly- flash eats CPU. It's the reason why Apple and other mobile developers don't support it on mobile devices.. If you watch your CPU usage while running simple flash objects you'll notice your CPU usage run through the roof, which heats your older laptop up to the point where it shuts itself off to prevent damaging it's internal components. (also uses a ton of power/drain a mobile device's battery) What you need is an alternative solution to flash, not another way to view flash movies.

If you're only attempting youTube I recommend uninstalling your flash player entirely. The way youTube codes their videos is: if Flash is not present it will serve the video via an HTML5 player, which may or may not have the same problem in fullscreen mode. Another thing to consider is something like an extension or plugin for chrome or firefox. There are countless of these that will isolate the flash video on the site you're on and let you download, and possibly convert it to another format. First google search i did returned this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/

One more suggestion: a laptop cooling pad. these have a fan or two on them, usually powered by your computer's USB (not sure if they're USB 1.0 or 2.0 and that may be an issue with a computer running a Centrino processor). They actually do help, my macbook pro gets super hot, and a simple cooling pad with two fans helps disperse that heat a lot for me.

If none of these suggestions work, sadly, you may have to simply avoid full screen... the internet couldn't imagine full screen internet streaming when the Centrino came out, so it may just be time to put down that old boy.

Thank you very much for your thorough explanation. I think I'll go with a way to cool it down more efficiently. A cooling pad will help and I'll see if I can take it further somehow. I am aware of those extensions that allow you to download and convert :) But I want to use that laptop to watch some movies/series online :P
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NahuelSep 6 '12 at 12:15

It's actually not very hard to build your own flv player that runs in Adobe AIR. There are some projects out there tied to the OSMF that you can feed an flv through. Also, there are browser plugins (mostly for firefox) that will grab flv files from sites, even if they're streamed.

Google for a desktop flv player. I found this one as the first result (http://www.wimpyplayer.com/products/wimpy_standalone_flv_player.html)

The last thing to note is that if the file is an mp4, there are even more players out there that will work with that.

might be your background running programs makes your cpu high first of all stop running updates and programs and to increase video streaming speed in YouTube, care must be taken to remove third party toolbars and optimize internet connection.